Race and Language in Prehistory

RACE and LANGUAGE in PREHISTORY

VINCENT M SARICH

I argue here that all the available data on Homo sapiens (molecular, morphological, linguistic, cultural) are most readily interpreted within the framework of a phylogenetic tree that links extant human populations over a time span of no more than the last 15,000 to 20,000 years. This is not to suggest that some ur-population speaking an ur-language lived in a geographically restricted Garden of Eden 15,000 years ago, expanding out of there to lead to what we have today. Instead, the scenario envisioned here goes to quite the other extreme in envisioning our "Garden of Eden" as the entire inhabited world of that period. I suggest that as recently as perhaps 15,000 years ago the human population was something very close to "panmictic" at all levels, and that most of the interpopulational differences we observe today, and in the recent past, have accumulated since then. The proposed "panmixis" is seen as driven by the last of the glacial pulsations which would have necessitated recurrent large-scale movements of populations, not only in areas "directly" affected by the glaciers themselves, but also in those that suffered the secondary effects of shifting climatic zones and major sea level changes. It thus must have been essentially world-wide, and only after populations began to settle down in more-or-less their current areas could regional differentiation leading have begun again. Thus we would have had episodic, glacial cycle driven, regional (racial) differentiation subsequent to the expansion of Homo out of Africa, and concomitant episodic obliteration ("panmixis") of most or all of the regionality. We then simply appear to be living in one of those episodes of regional differentiation, with ours beginning with the last glacial retreat. These episodes of developing regionality would have been characterized by differential retention of portions of the existing variation (which would have been, just as today, substantial but basically intrapopulational) plus in situ developments. The degrees of past regionality achieved would, then, presumably, have been strongly correlated with the lengths of the glacial/interglacial cycles involved, and thus potentially much greater than that present today.

Complete Article